And My Axe!

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Another of those vaguely meh ‘if I blog about it, the time I spent playing it wasn’t wasted’ webgames. Swig and Toss is a free promotional doohickey for the upcoming Lord of the Rings Online expansion, The Mines of Moria. It’s about dwarves (dwarfs? I can never remember which is Tolkien-approved), axe-throwing and booze.

A winning combination, surely. Only very, very briefly, sadly. The hoped-for incomprehensible shouting and accidental maimings are sadly absent, and instead we get a reasonable approximation of pissed-up darts. The more you drink, the more money you can bet and win – but the harder it is to land your axe, using an olde worlde golf videogame timed-click system, augmented with a faintly fun crazy-booze-vision effect. That is all. High opportunity for humour is sadly squandered in favour of nothingy ‘you aren’t very good at throwing / are quite drunk’ quips, but there is a points-battlin’ multiplayer mode if you bother to register, which could be a hoot. And, y’know, free.

8 Comments

For drunken axe throwing mini-games Heimdall has yet to be beaten. Though LotRO itself does have some entertaining virtual drinking games during Festivals; their Drunk-FX pixel shading tom-foolery is rather good indeed.

According to wikipedia, Tolkien uses Dwarves as a plural, which is good, as its clearly the better form. It also says:

“The form dwarfs is generally used for real people affected by dwarfism; the form dwarves is used for the mythical people described by Tolkien and others.” Which just makes me think of the misunderstandings that could occur if the wrong plural was used.

I’ve also just discovered that Gandalf was named after a Norse dwarf.

Edit: Wikipedia also implies that Tolkien uses Elves (again the better plural) but I could swear at one point being surprised to se him use Elfs. But seeing as it surprised me (and not prior or subsequently) at the time it was possibly a one off error in my copy.

@ James G:
Chances are you were reading an earlier edition at the time. They were usually the victims of stubborn proofreaders’ “corrections” on such things, hence seeing “dwarfs” when Tolkien intended “dwarves” (and other things along those lines). Much of the work Tolkien did for later editions was simply fixing the damage done by other people’s proofreading and getting the books back to the way they were when he first wrote them.